Polychromatic (XBOX One)

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Sturmvogel Prime
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Polychromatic (XBOX One)

Post by Sturmvogel Prime »

Digging deep into the library of released XBOX One games took me to this unexpected game. So, it's time to talk about the very first shmup for the XBOX One: Polychromatic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGkrAk_pPWU
Looks like a minimalist painting from an art museum became alive and engage in a dogfight.

The game is an Arena type shmup in the style of Robotron 2084, Smash TV and Omega Race. There's three gameplay modes: Endless Mode, Timed Mode and One-life Mode. Endless Mode is your "Main Game", as the objective is to survive as far as possible. You have a good amount of lives, Blasts and Dashes to pull this job. Timed Mode is your Time Attack where you have to destroy as much waves of enemies as possible to gain more time. You can die as much as you want in this mode, but doing that means losing a few seconds between death and respawn. One-life Mode is the Survival Mode where you only have one life to advance as far as possible without dying once.

The controls in this game are very easy lo learn: The left analog stick controls your ship, the right analog is your fire button aimed to a specific direction, giving you a 360° range. LB and RB are your Dash buttons whle Left and Right Triggers are your Blast buttons. The Dash function gives your ship a quick impulse to dodge through tight patterns and enemy formations, but you have to be careful when to use it because you can accidentally slam yourself to your death by crashing with an enemy. The Blast is your bomb, which fires an expanding circular pattern of bullets destroying any enemy that gets close to you. However, the Blast doesn't destroy enemy bullets, which partially fails on its purpose as a "Bomb" weapon.

The game's level structure is comprised by waves which increases as you complete the required number of eliminated enemies to advance. As you advance, the enemy patterns change and with them, the number of bullets increases, but also your firepower increases as your initial Twin Shot becames 3-Way, 4-Way and 5-Way Spread Shots which come in handy to fight as long as possible in the circular arena.

Image

Graphically, there's not too much to talk about Polychromatic's graphics. Your ship (if we can call it a ship) is an "8-Point Star" that is actually two squares combined, and one of them spins constantly giving the illusion of being 8-pointed, then random shaped to a simple square and back. The game's enemies are based on polygon shapes such as squares, hexagons and triangles, along with irregular polygons such as a waterdrop, a green 6-Point Star, a blue random shape that is actually two merged pentagons that split after being shot or a blue "cone" that looks made with a rhombus and a square together. The game's score and status indicators are located in the middle of the arena, as opposed to the traditional upper-side of the screen, which is kind of unusual on games like this, not to mention, the background and the arena colors never change. The game's use of simple shapes and colors isn't just basic, but also a take on Minimalism, where art is created and found thoughout very simplified works which could be interesting for fans of this art style, but for the common gamer is just a waste of the XBOX One's potential.

Musically, the game can be descrbided as Jean-Michel Jarre influenced, as the game's music blends Ambient with New Age that suddenly rocks with some guitaring and trances, pretty much like the Jarremix album of Jean-Michel Jarre, which can i consider the best part of the game.


TRIVIA

- The game's title comes from the word Polychrome, a term used to refer styles of architecture and pottery in multiple colors.
- Polychromatic is a term that means "Having multiple colors" it is used to describe light that exhibits more than one color, which also means that it contains radiation of more than one wavelength.


If you're a fan of Arena Shooters or Minimalist art, then i recommend you this game, otherwise stay away since the graphics doesn't have too much to offer.
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